The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 634

_The Origin of Religion._—The metaphysical requirement is not the origin of religions, as Schopenhauer claims, but only a _later sprout_ from them. Under the dominance of religious thoughts we have accustomed ourselves to the idea of "another (back, under, or upper) world," and feel an uncomfortable void and privation through the annihilation of the religious illusion;—and then "another world" grows out of this feeling once more, but now it is only a metaphysical world, and no longer a religious one. That however which in general led to the assumption of "another world" in primitive times, was _not_ an impulse or requirement, but an _error_ in the interpretation of certain natural phenomena, a difficulty of the intellect.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 105

Indulge thy best or thy worst desires, and above all, go to wreck!—in either case thou art still probably the furtherer and benefactor of mankind in some way or other, and in that respect thou mayest have thy panegyrists—and similarly thy mockers! But thou wilt never find him who would be quite qualified to mock at thee, the individual, at thy best, who could bring home to thy conscience its limitless, buzzing and croaking wretchedness so as to be in accord with truth!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1066

Let it be further accepted that it is not only speech that serves as a bridge between man and man, but also the looks, the pressure and the gestures; our becoming conscious of our sense impressions, our power of being able to fix them, and as it were to locate them outside of ourselves, has increased in proportion as the necessity has increased for communicating them to _others_ by means of signs.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1180

But do not my stomach, my heart, my blood and my bowels also protest? Do I not become hoarse unawares under its influence? And then I ask myself what it is really that my body _wants_ from music generally. I believe it wants to have _relief_: so that all animal functions should be accelerated by means of light, bold, unfettered, self-assured rhythms; so that brazen, leaden life should be gilded by means of golden, good, tender harmonies.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 39

Those Greeks were superficial—_from profundity_! And are we not coming back precisely to this point, we dare-devils of the spirit, who have scaled the highest and most dangerous peak of contemporary thought, and have looked around us from it, have _looked down_ from it? Are we not precisely in this respect—Greeks? Worshippers of forms, of tones, and of words? And precisely on that account—artists?

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 309

_Where Goodness Begins._—Where bad eyesight can no longer see the evil impulse as such, on account of its refinement,—there man sets up the kingdom of goodness; and the feeling of having now gone over into the kingdom of goodness brings all those impulses (such as the feelings of security, of comfortableness, of benevolence) into simultaneous activity, which were threatened and confined by the evil impulses. Consequently, the duller the eye so much the further does goodness extend! Hence the eternal cheerfulness of the populace and of children! Hence the gloominess and grief (allied to the bad conscience) of great thinkers.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 998

The error of the more subtle amongst them is that they discover and criticise the probably foolish opinions of a people about its own morality, or the opinions of mankind about human morality generally; they treat accordingly of its origin, its religious sanctions, the superstition of free will, and such matters; and they think that just by so doing they have criticised the morality itself.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1213

"Wax in the ears," was then almost a condition of philosophising; a genuine philosopher no longer listened to life, in so far as life is music, he _denied_ the music of life—it is an old philosophical superstition that all music is Sirens' music.—Now we should be inclined at the present day to judge precisely in the opposite manner (which in itself might be just as false), and to regard _ideas_, with their cold, anæmic appearance, and not even in spite of this appearance, as worse seducers than the senses.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1336

Dance, oh! dance on all the edges, Wave-crests, cliffs and mountain ledges, Ever finding dances new! Let our knowledge be our gladness, Let our art be sport and madness, All that's joyful shall be true!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 536

The series of "causes" stands before us much more complete in every case; we conclude that this and that must first precede in order that that other may follow—but we have not _grasped_ anything thereby. The peculiarity, for example, in every chemical process seems a "miracle," the same as before, just like all locomotion; nobody has "explained" impulse. How could we ever explain!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1248

"_And once more Grow Clear._"—We, the generous and rich in spirit, who stand at the sides of the streets like open fountains and would hinder no one from drinking from us: we do not know, alas! how to defend ourselves when we should like to do so; we have no means of preventing ourselves being made _turbid_ and dark,—we have no means of preventing the age in which we live casting its "up-to-date rubbish" into us, nor of hindering filthy birds throwing their excrement, the boys their trash, and fatigued resting travellers their misery, great and small, into us. But we do as we have always done: we take whatever is cast into us down into our depths—for we are deep, we do not forget—_and once more grow clear_....

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 301

The appearance of pessimistic philosophies is not at all the sign of great and dreadful miseries; for these interrogative marks regarding the worth of life appear in periods when the refinement and alleviation of existence already deem the unavoidable gnat-stings of the soul and body as altogether too bloody and wicked; and in the poverty of actual experiences of pain, would now like to make _painful general ideas_ appear as suffering of the worst kind.—There might indeed be a remedy for pessimistic philosophies and the excessive sensibility which seems to me the real "distress of the present":—but perhaps this remedy already sounds too cruel, and would itself be reckoned among the symptoms owing to which people at present conclude that "existence is something evil." Well!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 230

Yet a little while, and this fruit of fruits hangs ripe and yellow on the tree of a people,—and only for the sake of such fruit did this tree exist! When the decay has reached its worst, and likewise the conflict of all sorts of tyrants, there always arises the Cæsar, the final tyrant, who puts an end to the exhausted struggle for sovereignty, by making the exhaustedness work for him.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1064

For, to repeat it once more, man, like every living creature, thinks unceasingly, but does not know it; the thinking which is becoming _conscious of itself_ is only the smallest part thereof, we may say, the most superficial part, the worst part:—for this conscious thinking alone _is done in words, that is to say, in the symbols for communication_, by means of which the origin of consciousness is revealed.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 36

And as to our future, we are not likely to be found again in the tracks of those Egyptian youths who at night make the temples unsafe, embrace statues, and would fain unveil, uncover, and put in clear light, everything which for good reasons is kept concealed.[2] No, we have got disgusted with this bad taste, this will to truth, to "truth at all costs," this youthful madness in the love of truth: we are now too experienced, too serious, too joyful, too singed, too profound for that....

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 951

And although silent here about some things, I will not, however, be silent about my morality, which says to me: Live in concealment in order that thou _mayest_ live to thyself. Live _ignorant_ of that which seems to thy age to be most important! Put at least the skin of three centuries betwixt thyself and the present day! And the clamour of the present day, the noise of wars and revolutions, ought to be a murmur to thee!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 199

_Evil._—Test the life of the best and most productive men and nations, and ask yourselves whether a tree which is to grow proudly heavenward can dispense with bad weather and tempests: whether disfavour and opposition from without, whether every kind of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, distrust, severity, greed, and violence do not belong to the _favouring_ circumstances without which a great growth even in virtue is hardly possible? The poison by which the weaker nature is destroyed is strengthening to the strong individual—and he does not call it poison.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 667

_Following and Leading._—A: "Of the two, the one will always follow, the other will always lead, whatever be the course of their destiny. _And yet_ the former is superior to the other in virtue and intellect." B: "And yet? And yet? That is spoken for the others; not for me, not for us!—_Fit secundum regulam._"

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1326

Thither I'll travel, that's my notion, I'll trust myself, my grip, Where opens wide and blue the ocean I'll ply my Genoa ship.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1273

Is it not clear morning round about us? And green, soft ground and turf, the domain of the dance? Was there ever a better hour in which to be joyful? Who will sing us a song, a morning song, so sunny, so light and so fledged that it will _not_ scare the tantrums,—but will rather invite them to take part in the singing and dancing.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 898

"Thy selfishness is the bane of thy life"—so rang the preaching for millenniums: it did harm, as we have said, to selfishness, and deprived it of much spirit, much cheerfulness, much ingenuity, and much beauty; it stultified and deformed and poisoned selfishness!—Philosophical antiquity, on the other hand, taught that there was another principal source of evil: from Socrates downwards, the thinkers were never weary of preaching that "your thoughtlessness and stupidity, your unthinking way of living according to rule, and your subjection to the opinion of your neighbour, are the reasons why you so seldom attain to happiness,—we thinkers are, as thinkers, the happiest of mortals." Let us not decide here whether this preaching against stupidity was more sound than the preaching against selfishness; it is certain, however, that stupidity was thereby deprived of its good conscience:—these philosophers _did harm to stupidity_.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 75

His look bewrays no envy: and ye laud him? He cares not, asks not if your throng applaud him! He has the eagle's eye for distance far, He sees you not, he sees but star on star!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1081

Ranks, guilds, and hereditary trade privileges succeeded, with the help of this belief, in rearing those extraordinary broad towers of society which distinguished the Middle Ages, and of which at all events one thing remains to their credit: capacity for duration (and duration is a value of the first rank on earth!).

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1243

We are too unprejudiced for that, too perverse, too fastidious; also too well-informed, and too much "travelled." We prefer much rather to live on mountains, apart and "out of season," in past or coming centuries, in order merely to spare ourselves the silent rage to which we know we should be condemned as witnesses of a system of politics which makes the German nation barren by making it vain, and which is a _petty_ system besides:—will it not be necessary for this system to plant itself between two mortal hatreds, lest its own creation should immediately collapse?

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 365

The ideas of things still continually shift and move, and will perhaps alter more than ever in the future; it is continually the most select spirits themselves who strive against universal obligatoriness—the investigators of _truth_ above all!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 843

_In Doing we Leave Undone._—In the main all those moral systems are distasteful to me which say: "Do not do this! Renounce! Overcome thyself!" On the other hand I am favourable to those moral systems which stimulate me to do something, and to do it again from morning till evening, and dream of it at night, and think of nothing else but to do it _well_, as well as it is possible for _me_ alone!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1110

I do not at all allude here to Eduard von Hartmann; on the contrary, my old suspicion is not vanished even at present that he is _too clever_ for us; I mean to say that as arrant rogue from the very first, he did not perhaps make merry solely over German Pessimism—and that in the end he might probably "bequeathe" to them the truth as to how far a person could bamboozle the Germans themselves in the age of bubble companies.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 184

Our pleasure in ourselves seeks to maintain itself, by always transforming something new _into ourselves_,—that is just possessing. To become satiated with a possession, that is to become satiated with ourselves.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 366

The accepted belief, as the belief of all the world, continually engenders a disgust and a new longing in the more ingenious minds; and already the slow _tempo_ which it demands for all intellectual processes (the imitation of the tortoise, which is here recognised as the rule) makes the artists and poets runaways:—it is in these impatient spirits that a downright delight in delirium breaks out, because delirium has such a joyful _tempo_! Virtuous intellects, therefore, are needed—ah!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 216

_L'Ordre du Jour pour le Roi._—The day commences: let us begin to arrange for this day the business and fêtes of our most gracious lord, who at present is still pleased to repose. His Majesty has bad weather to-day: we shall be careful not to call it bad; we shall not speak of the weather,—but we shall go through to-day's business somewhat more ceremoniously and make the fêtes somewhat more festive than would otherwise be necessary.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 935

We moderns are just beginning to form the chain of a very powerful, future sentiment, link by link,—we hardly know what we are doing. It almost seems to us as if it were not the question of a new sentiment, but of the decline of all old sentiments:—the historical sense is still something so poor and cold, and many are attacked by it as by a frost, and are made poorer and colder by it.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 764

But then the almighty strength of our tasks forced us apart once more into different seas and into different zones, and perhaps we shall never see one another again,—or perhaps we may see one another, but not know one another again; the different seas and suns have altered us! That we had to become strangers to one another is the law to which we are _subject_: just by that shall we become more sacred to one another! Just by that shall the thought of our former friendship become holier!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1148

If we listen to doctors who have hypnotised women, or, finally, if we love them—and let ourselves be "hypnotised" by them,—what is always divulged thereby? That they "give themselves airs," even when they—"give themselves."... Woman is so artistic....

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 499

_The Germans as Artists._—When once a German actually experiences passion (and not only, as is usual, the mere inclination to it), he then behaves just as he must do in passion, and does not think further of his behaviour.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 993

It is obvious that up to the present morality has not been a problem at all; it has rather been the very ground on which people have met, after all distrust, dissension, and contradiction, the hallowed place of peace, where thinkers could obtain rest even from themselves, could recover breath and revive. I see no one who has ventured to _criticise_ the estimates of moral worth.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1038

Philosophers will also perhaps be the latest to acknowledge that the people _should_ understand something of that which lies furthest from them, something of the great _passion_ of the thinker, who lives and must live continually in the storm-cloud of the highest problems and the heaviest responsibilities (consequently, not gazing at all, to say nothing of doing so indifferently, securely, objectively).

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 384

One rightly objects to the dramatic poet when he does not transform everything into reason and speech, but always retains a remnant of _silence_:—just as one is dissatisfied with an operatic musician who cannot find a melody for the highest emotion, but only an emotional, "natural" stammering and crying. Here nature _has to_ be contradicted! Here the common charm of illusion _has to_ give place to a higher charm! The Greeks go far, far in this direction—frightfully far!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1296

Yester-eve, when all things slept— Scarce a breeze to stir the lane— I a restless vigil kept, Nor from pillows sleep could gain, Nor from poppies nor—most sure Of opiates—a conscience pure.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 888

_What Belongs to Greatness._—Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel the force and will in himself _to inflict_ great pain? The ability to suffer is a small matter: in that line, weak women and even slaves often attain masterliness. But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great anguish and hears the cry of this anguish—that is great, that belongs to greatness.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 422

He who has enough of tragedy and comedy in himself surely prefers to remain away from the theatre; or, as the exception, the whole procedure—theatre and public and poet included—becomes for him a truly tragic and comic play, so that the performed piece counts for little in comparison.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1198

The being richest in overflowing vitality, the Dionysian God and man, may not only allow himself the spectacle of the horrible and questionable, but even the fearful deed itself, and all the luxury of destruction, disorganisation and negation. With him evil, senselessness and ugliness seem as it were licensed, in consequence of the overflowing plenitude of procreative, fructifying power, which can convert every desert into a luxuriant orchard.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1289

No reasons for me, if you please; Their end is too dull and too plain; But a pair of wings and a breeze, With courage and health and ease, And games that chase disease From the South!

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 5

Perhaps more than one preface would be necessary for this book; and after all it might still be doubtful whether any one could be brought nearer to the _experiences_ in it by means of prefaces, without having himself experienced something similar.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 848

But how unendurable he has now become to others, how difficult even for himself to bear, how impoverished and cut off from the finest accidents of his soul! Yea, even from all further _instruction_! For we must be able to lose ourselves at times, if we want to learn something of what we have not in ourselves.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1109

That there has been thinking and printing even in Germany since Schopenhauer's time on the problem raised by him,—it was late enough!—does not at all suffice to enable us to decide in favour of this closer relationship; one could, on the contrary, lay great stress on the peculiar _awkwardness_ of this post-Schopenhauerian Pessimism—Germans evidently do not behave themselves there as in their element.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 596

_Pessimists as Victims._—When a profound dislike of existence gets the upper hand, the after-effect of a great error in diet of which a people has been long guilty comes to light. The spread of Buddhism (_not_ its origin) is thus to a considerable extent dependent on the excessive and almost exclusive rice-fare of the Indians, and on the universal enervation that results therefrom.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1292

While beauty in my face is, Be piety my care, For God, you know, loves lasses, And, more than all, the fair. And if yon hapless monkling Is fain with me to live, Like many another monkling, God surely will forgive.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 1127

The art of making the European spirit shallower, especially in the north, or more _good-natured_, if people would rather hear it designated by a moral expression, undoubtedly took a clever step in advance in the Lutheran Reformation; and similarly there grew out of it the mobility and disquietude of the spirit, its thirst for independence, its belief in the right to freedom, and its "naturalness." If people wish to ascribe to the Reformation in the last instance the merit of having prepared and favoured that which we at present honour as "modern science," they must of course add that it is also accessory to bringing about the degeneration of the modern scholar with his lack of reverence, of shame and of profundity; and that it is also responsible for all naïve candour and plain-dealing in matters of knowledge, in short for the _plebeianism of the spirit_ which is peculiar to the last two centuries, and from which even pessimism hitherto, has not in any way delivered us.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 129

He is offended at him who succumbs to the passion of the belly, but he understands the allurement which here plays the tyrant; but he does not understand, for example, how a person out of love of knowledge can stake his health and honour on the game. The taste of the higher nature devotes itself to exceptional matters, to things which usually do not affect people, and seem to have no sweetness; the higher nature has a singular standard of value.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza), passage 705

_Consideration._—Fathers and sons are much more considerate of one another than mothers and daughters.

The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza)

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